Iremember the times when no game was too long for me. I even remember dismissing the notion of a game, a good game, ever being called "too long" absurd. How can something good ever outstay its welcome? I remember playing for days, for weeks, weekends and evenings disappearing into maws of games like Civilization, Fallout, the Ultimas, the Final Fantasies.

In 2010, Jordan Magnuson did something special: He set out on a crazy adventure to travel Asia and make short computer games (and notgames) about the things that impacted him along the way. After 236 days of travel through five Asian countries (Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, Cambodia and Malaysia), Jordan's adventure of "gametrekking" was completed, as well as 10 games made during and about this journey and the people and places he visited.

I contacted Jordan and asked him a few questions about travel, games and notgames.

Tale of Tales, the Belgian couple behind experimental games like Endless Forest, The Graveyard, The Path and now Bientôt l'été, are known for their artistic, dreamlike games. In August 2011, they helped curate a small exhibition accompanying the Cologne Games Lab. The show included games experiments like Dear Esther, Kairo, Trauma as well as Amnesia and Tale of Tales' own titles and offered a unique glimpse into a creative games underground.

The motto and title of the exhibition, and of the games shown in it, was "notgames". And that's a problem.

Our ancestors are within us. For roughly 200,000 years Homo sapiens sapiens has roamed the planet, and it's easy to forget that we, as our even more remote relatives, are nomads by nature - hunter-gatherers, wanderers, vagrants. It has only been a puny 8,000 years since our style of life has become sedentary, since the concept of 'city' or even 'village' appeared, since both the blessing and curse of 'civilization' were realized. Man is - both physically and mentally - nomadic.

Eron Rauch, "A Land to Die In (Every Player Corpse from 1-70)" from A Land to Die In (Detail)

A few weeks ago, LA-based artist, writer and VGT-reader Eron Rauch contacted me to discuss some of the finer points of In-Game Photography. This conversation led me to ask him to collect his thoughts in an essay about the relation of In-Game Photography and traditional photography and art. Here it is.

If you are anything like me, you had friends who linked Rainer's "The Art of in-game Photography." If you are anything like me, you saw many of your friends duke it out on Facebook and Twitter over whether or not this was a legitimate art — whether it was even photography.